OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Architecture of a Flexible and Cost-Effective Remote Code Execution Engine
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

Oftentimes, there is a need to experiment with different programming languages and technologies when designing software applications. Such experiments must be reproducible and share-able within a team workplace, and manual effort should be minimized for setting up/tearing down said experiments. This paper solves this problem by presenting a cloud-based web service for remote code execution, that is easily extensible to support any number of programming languages and libraries. The service provides a fast, reproducible solution for small software experiments and is amenable to collaboration in a workplace (via sharable permalinks). The service is designed as a distributed system to reliably support a large number of users, and efficiently manage cloud-hosting costs with predictive auto-scaling while minimizing SLA violations.
Semantic Extractor-Paraphraser based Abstractive Summarization
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

The anthology of spoken languages today is inundated with textual information, necessitating the development of automatic summarization models. In this manuscript, we propose an extractor-paraphraser based abstractive summarization system that exploits semantic overlap as opposed to its predecessors that focus more on syntactic information overlap. Our model outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in terms of ROUGE, METEOR and word mover similarity (WMS), establishing the superiority of the proposed system via extensive ablation experiments. We have also challenged the summarization capabilities of the state of the art Pointer Generator Network (PGN), and through thorough experimentation, shown that PGN is more of a paraphraser, contrary to the prevailing notion of a summarizer; illustrating it's incapability to accumulate information across multiple sentences.
Implicit Regularization in Deep Tensor Factorization
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Attempts of studying implicit regularization associated to gradient descent (GD) have identified matrix completion as a suitable test-bed. Late findings suggest that this phenomenon cannot be phrased as a minimization-norm problem, implying that a paradigm shift is required and that dynamics has to be taken into account. In the present work we address the more general setup of tensor completion by leveraging two popularized tensor factorization, namely Tucker and TensorTrain (TT). We track relevant quantities such as tensor nuclear norm, effective rank, generalized singular values and we introduce deep Tucker and TT unconstrained factorization to deal with the completion task. Experiments on both synthetic and real data show that gradient descent promotes solution with low-rank, and validate the conjecture saying that the phenomenon has to be addressed from a dynamical perspective.
Deep Extended Feedback Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

A new deep-neural-network (DNN) based error correction encoder architecture for channels with feedback, called Deep Extended Feedback (DEF), is presented in this paper. The encoder in the DEF architecture transmits an information message followed by a sequence of parity symbols which are generated based on the message as well as the observations of the past forward channel outputs sent to the transmitter through a feedback channel. DEF codes generalize Deepcode [1] in several ways: parity symbols are generated based on forward-channel output observations over longer time intervals in order to provide better error correction capability; and high-order modulation formats are deployed in the encoder so as to achieve increased spectral efficiency. Performance evaluations show that DEF codes have better performance compared to other DNN-based codes for channels with feedback.
Weak Multi-View Supervision for Surface Mapping Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

We propose a weakly-supervised multi-view learning approach to learn category-specific surface mapping without dense annotations. We learn the underlying surface geometry of common categories, such as human faces, cars, and airplanes, given instances from those categories. While traditional approaches solve this problem using extensive supervision in the form of pixel-level annotations, we take advantage of the fact that pixel-level UV and mesh predictions can be combined with 3D reprojections to form consistency cycles. As a result of exploiting these cycles, we can establish a dense correspondence mapping between image pixels and the mesh acting as a self-supervisory signal, which in turn helps improve our overall estimates. Our approach leverages information from multiple views of the object to establish additional consistency cycles, thus improving surface mapping understanding without the need for explicit annotations. We also propose the use of deformation fields for predictions of an instance specific mesh. Given the lack of datasets providing multiple images of similar object instances from different viewpoints, we generate and release a multi-view ShapeNet Cars and Airplanes dataset created by rendering ShapeNet meshes using a 360 degree camera trajectory around the mesh. For the human faces category, we process and adapt an existing dataset to a multi-view setup. Through experimental evaluations, we show that, at test time, our method can generate accurate variations away from the mean shape, is multi-view consistent, and performs comparably to fully supervised approaches.
An Overview of Laser Injection against Embedded Neural Network Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

For many IoT domains, Machine Learning and more particularly Deep Learning brings very efficient solutions to handle complex data and perform challenging and mostly critical tasks. However, the deployment of models in a large variety of devices faces several obstacles related to trust and security. The latest is particularly critical since the demonstrations of severe flaws impacting the integrity, confidentiality and accessibility of neural network models. However, the attack surface of such embedded systems cannot be reduced to abstract flaws but must encompass the physical threats related to the implementation of these models within hardware platforms (e.g., 32-bit microcontrollers). Among physical attacks, Fault Injection Analysis (FIA) are known to be very powerful with a large spectrum of attack vectors. Most importantly, highly focused FIA techniques such as laser beam injection enable very accurate evaluation of the vulnerabilities as well as the robustness of embedded systems. Here, we propose to discuss how laser injection with state-of-the-art equipment, combined with theoretical evidences from Adversarial Machine Learning, highlights worrying threats against the integrity of deep learning inference and claims that join efforts from the theoretical AI and Physical Security communities are a urgent need.
Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Learning and Teaching: a Case Study from Higher Education
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2021
Year: 2021

In December 2019, the first case of SARS-CoV-2 infection was identified in Wuhan, China. Since that day, COVID-19 has spread worldwide, affecting 153 million people. Education, as many other sectors, has managed to adapt to the requirements and barriers implied by the impossibility to teach students face-to-face as it was done before. Yet, little is known about the implications of emergency remote teaching (ERT) during the pandemic. This study describes and analyzes the impact of the pandemic on the study patterns of higher education students. The analysis was performed by the integration of three main components: (1) interaction with the learning management system (LMS), (2) Assignment submission rate, and (3) Teachers' perspective. Several variables were created to analyze the study patterns, clicks on different LMS components, usage during the day, week and part of the term, the time span of interaction with the LMS, and grade categories. The results showed significant differences in study patterns depending on the year of study, and the variables reflecting the effect of teachers' changes in the course structure are identified. This study outlines the first insights of higher education's new normality, providing important implications for supporting teachers in creating academic material that adequately addresses students' particular needs depending on their year of study, changes in study pattern, and distribution of time and activity through the term.
Towards Accountability in the Use of Artificial Intelligence for Public Administrations
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

We argue that the phenomena of distributed responsibility, induced acceptance, and acceptance through ignorance constitute instances of imperfect delegation when tasks are delegated to computationally-driven systems. Imperfect delegation challenges human accountability. We hold that both direct public accountability via public transparency and indirect public accountability via transparency to auditors in public organizations can be both instrumentally ethically valuable and required as a matter of deontology from the principle of democratic self-government. We analyze the regulatory content of 16 guideline documents about the use of AI in the public sector, by mapping their requirements to those of our philosophical account of accountability, and conclude that while some guidelines refer to processes that amount to auditing, it seems that the debate would benefit from more clarity about the nature of the entitlement of auditors and the goals of auditing, also in order to develop ethically meaningful standards with respect to which different forms of auditing can be evaluated and compared.
mil-benchmarks: Standardized Evaluation of Deep Multiple-Instance Learning Techniques
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Multiple-instance learning is a subset of weakly supervised learning where labels are applied to sets of instances rather than the instances themselves. Under the standard assumption, a set is positive only there is if at least one instance in the set which is positive. This paper introduces a series of multiple-instance learning benchmarks generated from MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and CIFAR10. These benchmarks test the standard, presence, absence, and complex assumptions and provide a framework for future benchmarks to be distributed. I implement and evaluate several multiple-instance learning techniques against the benchmarks. Further, I evaluate the Noisy-And method with label noise and find mixed results with different datasets. The models are implemented in TensorFlow 2.4.1 and are available on GitHub. The benchmarks are available from PyPi as mil-benchmarks and on GitHub.
GraphTMT: Unsupervised Graph-based Topic Modeling from Video Transcripts
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

To unfold the tremendous amount of multimedia data uploaded daily to social media platforms, effective topic modeling techniques are needed. Existing work tends to apply topic models on written text datasets. In this paper, we propose a topic extractor on video transcripts. Exploiting neural word embeddings through graph-based clustering, we aim to improve usability and semantic coherence. Unlike most topic models, this approach works without knowing the true number of topics, which is important when no such assumption can or should be made. Experimental results on the real-life multimodal dataset MuSe-CaR demonstrates that our approach GraphTMT extracts coherent and meaningful topics and outperforms baseline methods. Furthermore, we successfully demonstrate the applicability of our approach on the popular Citysearch corpus.
Radio Communication Scenarios in 5G-Railways
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2021
Year: 2021

With the rapid development of railways, especially high-speed railways, there is an increasingly urgent demand for new wireless communication system for railways. Taking the mature 5G technology as an opportunity, 5G-railways (5G-R) have been widely regarded as a solution to meet the diversified demands of railway wireless communications. For the design, deployment and improvement of 5G-R networks, radio communication scenario classification plays an important role, affecting channel modeling and system performance evaluation. In this paper, a standardized radio communication scenario classification, including 18 scenarios, is proposed for 5G-R. This paper analyzes the differences of 5G-R scenarios compared with the traditional cellular networks and GSM-railways, according to 5G-R requirements and the unique physical environment and propagation characteristics. The proposed standardized scenario classification helps deepen the research of 5G-R and promote the development and application of the existing advanced technologies in railways.
Conversational Machine Reading Comprehension for Vietnamese Healthcare Texts
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Machine reading comprehension (MRC) is a sub-field in natural language processing that aims to assist computers understand unstructured texts and then answer questions related to them. In practice, the conversation is an essential way to communicate and transfer information. To help machines understand conversation texts, we present UIT-ViCoQA, a new corpus for conversational machine reading comprehension in the Vietnamese language. This corpus consists of 10,000 questions with answers over 2,000 conversations about health news articles. Then, we evaluate several baseline approaches for conversational machine comprehension on the UIT-ViCoQA corpus. The best model obtains an F1 score of 45.27%, which is 30.91 points behind human performance (76.18%), indicating that there is ample room for improvement. Our dataset is available at our website: http://nlp.uit.edu.vn/datasets/ for research purposes.
Poisoning the Unlabeled Dataset of Semi-Supervised Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Semi-supervised machine learning models learn from a (small) set of labeled training examples, and a (large) set of unlabeled training examples. State-of-the-art models can reach within a few percentage points of fully-supervised training, while requiring 100x less labeled data. We study a new class of vulnerabilities: poisoning attacks that modify the unlabeled dataset. In order to be useful, unlabeled datasets are given strictly less review than labeled datasets, and adversaries can therefore poison them easily. By inserting maliciously-crafted unlabeled examples totaling just 0.1% of the dataset size, we can manipulate a model trained on this poisoned dataset to misclassify arbitrary examples at test time (as any desired label). Our attacks are highly effective across datasets and semi-supervised learning methods. We find that more accurate methods (thus more likely to be used) are significantly more vulnerable to poisoning attacks, and as such better training methods are unlikely to prevent this attack. To counter this we explore the space of defenses, and propose two methods that mitigate our attack.
Solo: A Lightweight Static Analysis for Differential Privacy
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2021
Year: 2021

All current approaches for statically enforcing differential privacy in higher order languages make use of either linear or relational refinement types. A barrier to adoption for these approaches is the lack of support for expressing these "fancy types" in mainstream programming languages. For example, no mainstream language supports relational refinement types, and although Rust and modern versions of Haskell both employ some linear typing techniques, they are inadequate for embedding enforcement of differential privacy, which requires "full" linear types a la Girard. We propose a new type system that enforces differential privacy, avoids the use of linear and relational refinement types, and can be easily embedded in mainstream richly typed programming languages such as Scala, OCaml and Haskell. We demonstrate such an embedding in Haskell, demonstrate its expressiveness on case studies, and prove that our type-based enforcement of differential privacy is sound.
Ovarian Cancer Detection based on Dimensionality Reduction Techniques and Genetic Algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

In this research, we have two serum SELDI (surface-enhanced laser desorption and ionization) mass spectra (MS) datasets to be used to select features amongst them to identify proteomic cancerous serums from normal serums. Features selection techniques have been applied and classification techniques have been applied as well. Amongst the features selection techniques we have chosen to evaluate the performance of PCA (Principal Component Analysis ) and GA (Genetic algorithm), and amongst the classification techniques we have chosen the LDA (Linear Discriminant Analysis) and Neural networks so as to evaluate the ability of the selected features in identifying the cancerous patterns. Results were obtained for two combinations of features selection techniques and classification techniques, the first one was PCA+(t-test) technique for features selection and LDA for accuracy tracking yielded an accuracy of 93.0233 % , the other one was genetic algorithm and neural network yielded an accuracy of 100%. So, we conclude that GA is more efficient for features selection and hence for cancerous patterns detection than PCA technique.
Challenges and Outlook in Robotic Manipulation of Deformable Objects
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Deformable object manipulation (DOM) is an emerging research problem in robotics. The ability to manipulate deformable objects endows robots with higher autonomy and promises new applications in the industrial, services, and healthcare sectors. However, compared to rigid object manipulation, the manipulation of deformable objects is considerably more complex, and is still an open research problem. Addressing DOM challenges demand breakthroughs in almost all aspects of robotics, namely hardware design, sensing, (deformation) modeling, planning, and control. In this article, we review recent advances and highlight the main challenges when considering deformation in each sub-field. A particular focus of our paper lies in the discussions of these challenges and proposing future directions of research.
Approximation schemes for bounded distance problems on fractionally treewidth-fragile graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2021
Year: 2021

We give polynomial-time approximation schemes for monotone maximization problems expressible in terms of distances (up to a fixed upper bound) and efficiently solvable in graphs of bounded treewidth. These schemes apply in all fractionally treewidth-fragile graph classes, a property that is true for many natural graph classes with sublinear separators. We also provide quasipolynomial-time approximation schemes for these problems in all classes with sublinear separators.
Real-time Deep Dynamic Characters
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

We propose a deep videorealistic 3D human character model displaying highly realistic shape, motion, and dynamic appearance learned in a new weakly supervised way from multi-view imagery. In contrast to previous work, our controllable 3D character displays dynamics, e.g., the swing of the skirt, dependent on skeletal body motion in an efficient data-driven way, without requiring complex physics simulation. Our character model also features a learned dynamic texture model that accounts for photo-realistic motion-dependent appearance details, as well as view-dependent lighting effects. During training, we do not need to resort to difficult dynamic 3D capture of the human; instead we can train our model entirely from multi-view video in a weakly supervised manner. To this end, we propose a parametric and differentiable character representation which allows us to model coarse and fine dynamic deformations, e.g., garment wrinkles, as explicit space-time coherent mesh geometry that is augmented with high-quality dynamic textures dependent on motion and view point. As input to the model, only an arbitrary 3D skeleton motion is required, making it directly compatible with the established 3D animation pipeline. We use a novel graph convolutional network architecture to enable motion-dependent deformation learning of body and clothing, including dynamics, and a neural generative dynamic texture model creates corresponding dynamic texture maps. We show that by merely providing new skeletal motions, our model creates motion-dependent surface deformations, physically plausible dynamic clothing deformations, as well as video-realistic surface textures at a much higher level of detail than previous state of the art approaches, and even in real-time.
Real-time Face Mask Detection in Video Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

In response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we present a robust deep learning pipeline that is capable of identifying correct and incorrect mask-wearing from real-time video streams. To accomplish this goal, we devised two separate approaches and evaluated their performance and run-time efficiency. The first approach leverages a pre-trained face detector in combination with a mask-wearing image classifier trained on a large-scale synthetic dataset. The second approach utilizes a state-of-the-art object detection network to perform localization and classification of faces in one shot, fine-tuned on a small set of labeled real-world images. The first pipeline achieved a test accuracy of 99.97% on the synthetic dataset and maintained 6 FPS running on video data. The second pipeline achieved a mAP(0.5) of 89% on real-world images while sustaining 52 FPS on video data. We have concluded that if a larger dataset with bounding-box labels can be curated, this task is best suited using object detection architectures such as YOLO and SSD due to their superior inference speed and satisfactory performance on key evaluation metrics.
ExcavatorCovid: Extracting Events and Relations from Text Corpora for Temporal and Causal Analysis for COVID-19
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Timely responses from policy makers to mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic rely on a comprehensive grasp of events, their causes, and their impacts. These events are reported at such a speed and scale as to be overwhelming. In this paper, we present ExcavatorCovid, a machine reading system that ingests open-source text documents (e.g., news and scientific publications), extracts COVID19 related events and relations between them, and builds a Temporal and Causal Analysis Graph (TCAG). Excavator will help government agencies alleviate the information overload, understand likely downstream effects of political and economic decisions and events related to the pandemic, and respond in a timely manner to mitigate the impact of COVID-19. We expect the utility of Excavator to outlive the COVID-19 pandemic: analysts and decision makers will be empowered by Excavator to better understand and solve complex problems in the future. An interactive TCAG visualization is available at http://afrl402.bbn.com:5050/index.html. We also released a demonstration video at https://vimeo.com/528619007.